The Mysteries of Pittsbrugh

When hungry, shave. 

We just moved to Pittsburgh, a lovely city, with all its post-industrial squalor and its impenetrable hills. I read on a web search that the steepest street in the country is somewhere here in town (37 degrees!), not in San Francisco, mind you. One curiosity about this city is that its streets and neighborhoods are almost impossible to figure out. Even the GPS has gotten confused, bonging, producing multiple arrows and screaming “when possible do a legal U-turn!” It is a so hard to figure out precisely because of its loveliness: all those hills and valleys produced little independent nests of neighborhoods which eventually crept to each other and interlaced fingers, sometimes with bridges, sometimes with tunnels, sometimes connecting streets that shouldn’t have connected. The basic problem is that each of these neighborhoods had its own distinct logic that doesn’t necessarily correspond to a composite whole. Forget grids. This town is a literal non-sequitur, “doesn’t follow.” And proudly so. 

So non-sequitur seems to be the order of the day around here. I gave a fly-fishing demonstration (yes, a patrician affectation from when I lived in New England) to Junior’s first grade class. I showed them flies I had tied, how a multiplier reel works, how to lift a weight-forward line into the air and cast it into a coffee cup twenty five feet away.

“Any questions or comments?” Hands rise. “Yes?”

“My dog ate a butterfly.” Lovely.

When hungry shave. When pressed for time, plant an heirloom tomato. Be good for a week, show up on time to the Weight Watchers meeting, lose nothing. Be so-so for the next week, lose four pounds. Don’t try to figure it out. The GPS will go crazy.

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